Page 47 of November

“With what? A donation or something?”

“Not exactly. I was thinking about a door.”

“Sorry. What?” her boss asked and pressed the button for their floor once they got inside the elevator.

“We butt up right next to them. The gap is really small. What? A few feet, maybe?”

“Yes, I know. They had to put the dumpster and stuff for the store behind the building because it wouldn’t fit between.”

“And the café’s back door is right there now.”

“Yes.”

“What if we had a door into the bookshop and offered the customers the use of our café?”

“Which is an employee-only location,” he said.

“But it doesn’thaveto be,” India replied. “We could call it something like a test kitchen, put up signs, warning people that these are employees in training or something, add a door there, cover the small gap, and they would have their own way into the lobby here. It would give Maisie a café.”

“Maisie?”

“The owner ofChapter & Verse.”

“You know the owner now?”

“Yes. But what do you think?”

“It’s a big change, one we weren’t planning for. Besides, opening the lobby to customers means having way more people down there waiting in lines, with trainees behind the counter.”

“What if I can get Juliet behind the idea? She’s the training manager now. And we don’t always have training classes there. Yes, sometimes, it’s staffed with trained employees, but we could put the signs up when there are trainees there and take them down when it’s the staff.”

“What does opening this up to customers get us?”

“Money,” she said.

“Well, obviously. But we made the decision to make it employees-only to make it an added benefit. We didn’t care about the money then. Why would we now? The lines would get longer. Employees might not like having to wait.”

The elevator dinged, indicating that they were on their floor.

“We could intensify the discounts,” she suggested. “We know the peak times for customers, right? So, we can give the employees their normal discount for using the café duringthose times, and we give them every drink for free if they go when the café is dead. Food prices are the same, or we give them another ten percent off or something.”

They walked out of the elevator and turned toward their offices.

“That sounds nice, but that’s difficult. You’re talking time-based pricing. That all has to be–”

“Set up? Yeah. I know just the IT person for the job. She programmed the POS systems down there. I’m sure she can configure them to have automatic price changes based on employee or customer and make that time-based as well.”

“All of this is just because you want the bookshop to have access to our store?”

“That was where I got the idea from,” she said.

“I’d need numbers,” her boss replied.

“I know. I’ll get them.”

“Did you already get the owner to agree?”

“No, I haven’t talked to her about it yet,” India replied. “But I will today.”